Vanities

I have not self-published a manuscript to kindle yet. I do not feel quite confident enough to do so, and do not know if I should, nor what I'm even worth, be it as a poet or columnist. I am also not sure how to ask advice of anyone who has self-published through Amazon's distribution model. I've read complaints on the Good Reads site about delayed commissions, but I only ever had a problem with one Amazon seller, long ago, before I understood how the retail giant is an Intranet unto itself, partnering with other businesses. I have always received payments promptly, however.

I have, this after 34 years as creative writer later journalist, one, mind you, one poetry manuscript of strongest work about ready to go, and I will not tell you how much money I've lost on contest fees and contributor copy support, I who cannot afford to enter all that many to begin with, over the years, with this one manuscript always ready to go, but I've now slowly developed a rhythm for electronic submissions, finally found formula, as it were, even if, my sorry slaving for Examiner aside, my most powerful essay on urban poverty I gave away to a woman named Bianca for her Appalachian area journal which I haven't yet added to my CV because yours truly doesn't know what Karina K did with my contributor copy, and I cannot get this Karina K back on the phone, and the one editor who liked my deaf pitch before that, I failed. And this is the stuff who opines for legacy media, with a select hit list for disabled members of the Philadelphia activist community, except for the fact that I've been published in established media, but not lately, since I am Anthony Elonis with a sometimes more insidious, or entertaining menace, not quite so puerile.

No husband to murder, and my scar tissue has throbbed on past my long ago supervisor's departure, c'est pas? I haven't read Elonis's posts. I suppose he reads like ISIS in an inflammatory state, but if he was writing his *puerile* invective against wife in a journal on paper, would we be here? I am as savage as he is on my bad days, teetering precariously toward brutal, and I mean brutal, institutional indigence. Barring a miracle, I know exactly how much control a nursing home will impose on me if I go from section 202 housing into a Medicaid home. I've lived it and earned a living from it. Established journalists even publish about it these days, and we take out the violins. I very seriously do not want my remaining years to linger in such a circumscribed fashion, and I'm back to submitting poems again, after all this time. I am a fool people, to let a resource center which was never very good to begin with, cause me so much damage, not as if the system offers disability entitlement recipients all that many options.